I thought I will never see this official release. This is good news.I think it's time for me to finally make a firmware update to my trusty 343 because I need the NFS feature.I believe 1.05 is enough tested and stable by now.

Currently I have fw 1.02 installed and worked well, but it's old.I'm a bit nervous about this as it's the first time updating the firmware of the NAS and I have a few questions:

Do you know if upgrading directly from 1.02 is safe? Do you have any idea what "Please make sure the Auto Power Recovery function is disabled before upgrading the firmware" means? Where do I find that setting?I will need to redo all the settings after fw update from 1.02 to 1.05?

As I understood the data should be safe. I have backup-ed the most important things but I don't have the space to backup everything so I would prefer to see the data at it's place after the update.

Do you have any other advices for me?

Thank you.

edit: Forgot to mention that is configured as RAID5 with one Ext3 volume spread over four 1G WD green drives.

edit2: I think I've found the setting in Maintenance/Power management/Power recovery: Enable/Disable

As I understood the data should be safe. I have backup-ed the most important things but I don't have the space to backup everything so I would prefer to see the data at it's place after the update.

Do you have any other advices for me?. . . .

edit: Forgot to mention that is configured as RAID5 with one Ext3 volume spread over four 1G WD green drives.

The firmware upgrade should not impact your existing HDD cofiguration or existing data. That said, you should always maintain a separate physical backup of your data. As I'm sure you're aware, RAID-5 provides redundancy, but is not a replacement for a separate physical backup. DNS-343 - Data Backup vs. Redundancy

Do you recall if that issue appeared in the earlier FW? I don't have a DNS-343 running the older FW you were previously using.

That option was not present in 1.02.But that is a minor issue. My biggest problem right now is that I get very poor performance over NFS.

First I've tested with the media player and it was seeing the folder structure and files but was not able to sustain playing any video content.Now I've tested with my computer and after mounting the NFS path and started to copy a file the speed reported by windows 7 started at 150KBps and slowly rises up to 750-900KBps (I couldn't wait more). Any video content that I try to play over NFS stutters very badly.Over SMB performance is much better (around 3MBps over WiFi and up to 10MBps over wire).

Could you please confirm what is your speed over NFS?I'm frustrated because I can't use it at that speed

PS: If you need instructions how to configure NFS on the NAS and windows 7 please let me know. It took me some time to figure all that out... I could write a small tutorial about that now

Are you volunteering to contribute to our FAQ library? Sure sounds like it! Every submission helps.

Here are some instructions. Please feel free to correct/cut/edit/rearrange them when adding to the FAQ (if you think they are worthy). Also if you have the time please make a speed test over NFS. I'm very frustrated about this as it seems everyone else on this forum doesn't seem to suffer from this. Thanks.

Configuring NFS network access on DNS-343 (f/w 1.05)

1) Log on to NAS web configuration and go to Advanced\Network access\NFS settings and set "NFS Server: Enable"2) Below, on "Network access settings" click "NFS"3) In "Host" field type "192.168.0.0/24" (assuming your network is 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0). This means you allow connections with all client IPs in range. If you want to grant access to a specific client then type in only the client's IP (without /24).4) In "Folder" field click "Browse" button and choose the folder to share, for instance "Volume_1/Some/Folder".5) Set desired permission then click "Save settings". Now in the "NFS list" below you should see the newly added entry. Here, one important information to note is the "Real path: /mnt/HD_a2/Some/Folder". You will use this to configure the client(s).

Configuring Windows 7 as NFS client

1) Go to CP\Programs\Turn Windows features on and off. Find in the windows features list "Services for NFS", expand it and check both items inside it ("Administrative tools" and "Client for NFS"). Then click OK.2) Go to Control Panel\System and Security\Administrative Tools\Services for Network File System (NFS). Click "Client for NFS" and in "Action" menu check the service to be started. If not then click "Start Service". Here, on the right, you can also find some useful help links.3) Open command prompt (cmd) and type "mount -o mtype=soft anon fileaccess=7 \\192.168.0.32\mnt\HD_a2\Some\Folder n:"Where:- mtype can be "soft" or "hard" depending if you want the client to endlessly try to connect to the NFS mount in case the connection in lost ("hard" may lead to unresponsive applications).- 192.168.0.32 is the NAS IP (modify with yours)- \mnt\HD_a2\Some\Folder is the real path mentioned in the NAS configuration- n: is the drive letter to mount the share.4) If after pressing ENTER you see "The command completed successfully." message then most probably everything is ok. To check, type "dir n:" and you should see the list with files and folders on the share. Also the share should already be seen in My computer as a Network location (If not then check the command prompt window NOT to be opened as administrator because the mount command will take effect only for the user that issued it and not for the others). Other useful commands are: "mount" to see what is mounted and "umount -a" to unmount all the drives.

I should have an opportunity to conduct a speed test in a week or so (it's in my to do queue).

Through drag-drop with Windows 7 Explorer I typically observe 30-33 MB/s download and 10-12 MB/s upload. I use SMB exclusively to stream video from my DNS-343 to Boxee Box (wired via DIR-857), but don't have hard metrics to report. Qualitatively, I can say that HD 1080 video plays seamlessly.

My DNS-343s are configured as Standard Volumes, which should exhibit better performance than your RAID-5 due to the overhead of the RAID array. Furthermore, the DNS-343 uses software RAID, which adds additional overhead than a hardware-based controller.